The Applicant has devised customisable paper business cards incorporating wireless communication chips (in particular, Near Field Communication or NFC chips). Digital information chosen by and specific to a particular customer is written to the NFC chip or tag in each business card. This digital information can be quickly and easily accessed, by someone to whom the business card is presented, utilising the NFC capabilities of that person's mobile device. Specifically, a user presented with an NFC-enabled business card containing an NFC tag or chip may bring his/her own user device (e.g. a smartphone with NFC capabilities) into contact with the business card, so as to facilitate transfer of the digital data stored in the NFC tag or chip to the user device. Such NFC-enabled business cards may be produced in large volumes, and retain all of the practical advantages associated with standard business cards whilst simultaneously providing enhanced user-interaction capabilities.
A system and method for printing and producing NFC-enabled business cards using a digital press is described in the Applicant's earlier application WO 2014/167344. In that application, it was envisaged that multiple NFC-enabled business cards would be produced in a single printed sheet, with the printed sheet comprising a bonded sheet pair with NFC tags/chips sandwiched between them. Several such printed sheets would be stacked together and vertical cuts would be made at predetermined locations through the stack of sheets in order to produce multiple stacks of business cards, each stack comprising a set of business cards destined for use by a particular customer. Each business card could have a particular print design (selected by the customer), and each print design would correspond to a certain set of properties and user-interaction capabilities of that particular business card. For example, a card with a first print design pattern may comprise digital data which would allow the user to obtain a URL link to the card owner's commercial website; a card with a second print design pattern may comprise digital data allowing the user to obtain a URL link to a website containing a promotional video uploaded by the card owner.
It is against this background that the present invention has been devised.